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Executive Overview
Collaborate or stagnate
To embrace the collaborative enterprise, businesses will undergo a mind shift. The ways in which people in companies work together and the ways companies think and do business are undergoing radical and unavoidable changes. What was once a business approach based on guarded and proprietary information available only to a select few people within an organization has become a business approach based on the need to collaborateboth inside and outside the four walls of an enterprise. As our global economy becomes more digital, businesses must drive down costs to be competitive and to improve profits. Both the ability and frequency of collaboration leads to improved organizational performance and, thus, profits. Indeed, to survive, an enterprise must be flexible enough to collaborate externally with its suppliers and partners while fostering that same environment among its employees. We must collaborate or we will surely stagnate. To embrace the collaborative enterprise, businesses will undergo a mind shift. Traditional organizational structures will have to make way for an open attitude towards every individual and every organization with which they work. This is the direct result of the rapid acceptance of the Internet as the medium for information exchange between employees, businesses and other organizations, customers and suppliers. Exact Software believes the walls that previously existed between various departments and organizations are tumbling down and in time will disappear altogether. They will have to disappear if an organization wants to stand out among its competition. Customers expect the best service regardless of the way they enter an organization. This service should come without delays resulting from, "That's not my department," or "You'll have to speak to my colleague." Solutions providers need to provide tools to increase an organization's effectiveness through collaboration.
New tools are being developed that provide the opportunity for organizations to extend their ERP systems.
Most businesses can afford to continuously expand its wealth of information without having to discard data or free up storage space.
make good and informed decisions faster. In today's highly competitive environment, this is a requirement, not an option.The call for broad, easily accessible business information has only become louder since the introduction of new, Internet-based communications. With easy to use standard software in the form of Web browsers that not only work on every modern PC and notebook but also on more compact equipment such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and even cellular telephones, it is possible to exchange information from any imaginable place, at any time. To extend the power of enterprise applications beyond the few, enter extended ERP solutions.
Key Tenets
Organizations should be prepared to collaborate, organize and extend their business systems. Some key tenetsintended to support those decisions: I keeping everything in one central database guarantees that all relevant information will be quickly available to employees at all times, thereby reducing the amount of paper and the time needed to make key decisions I providing secure, role based access by all in a single sign-on environment ensures employees, customers, partners and others have secure access to everything they need I automating all business processes leads to streamlined requests and workflow requiring less time to complete tasks
at any given time. You also run a security risk when anyone can access a hardcopy document. Paper documents also lack the ability to be linked to other information, making it difficult to track them down. Extended ERP systems provide the ability to digitize this information and store it once. Solutions can structure and enrich recorded information by making hyperlinks between data. This makes insight into data in a specific context possible anytime at any desired level of detail, and allows for the retrieval of related information. Mandatory key words and free text search options provide optimal access to all documents relevant to the organization. Only digitizing everything will guarantee that, besides information created within the system, all external information will be available for review and analysis by employees and others involved in the organization.
The most important advantage is that, like the data storage, the entire system can be managed and maintained centrally.
Extended ERP should be developed as one system, with one interface for every user in the form of his/her Web browser. The rights assigned to a user are established once. Logging in once provides users with access to all the information and functions to which they are entitled. Having to remember multiple user name/password combinations is now a thing of the past. For the organization, the fact that every user has only one user name/password combination means a significant simplification of the management of user rights. This translates directly into a lower cost of ownership of the system as a whole.
Architecture
The above-mentioned tenets form what is referred to as three-tier architecture: a database layer, an application layer and a presentation layer. You may view system architecture as something for technocrats, but this gives extended ERP a number of essential advantages. The most important advantage is that, like the data storage, the entire system can be managed and maintained centrally. The time-consuming and costly management and maintenance on the part of the users can be reduced to practically nothing. All a user requires is a Web browser, a user name and a password. A second advantage is that the management, maintenance and security of the system can be outsourced easily, eliminating expensive investments in infrastructure. The advantages of outsourcing include a better insight into costs, clear agreements as to the performance and availability of the system (in the form of Service Level Agreements), and the fact that the company no longer has to hire its own IT personnel. These factors make outsourcing an attractive alternative for small and medium-sized businesses.
HRM is also the functional component that handles online management and planning of employees, task delegation, management of workflows, absence tracking, and dealing with matters such as expenses and special compensation.
Logistics not only keeps information up-to-date concerning products and services you have sold to your customers and related information such as brochures, manuals and guarantees, but also facilitates the management of products that are used internally such as equipment, furniture and office supplies. On an individual basis, items that employees may or may not acquire can be established. CRM is an essential tool for effective, goal-oriented account management and sales automation, including the planning of activities per account, recording hours spent on an account, managing marketing campaigns, managing your sales pipeline, as well as publishing online product information and catalogs. Internal product information can also be made available for suppliers, so that they can take timely initiative to replenish stocks. Logistics is prepared for information exchange via the XML protocol.
of request are managed. Uniform and efficient processing of requests is thus guaranteed. e-Workflow offers your employees, customers and partners the ability to view the current status of requests, without having to call, write or e-mail. With workflow's built-in reporting and analysis capabilities, you can ascertain which types of requests are most common, how many requests a given employee has processed in a given period of time, how long their average requests remained open, and what is the average processing time of a particular type of request. This allows you to streamline your business processes, while continuously evaluating and improving those processes. In addition to the predefined request types in workflow, you can define as many new, company-specific requests as you like.
Organizations require a user-friendly, flexible and definable document creation and management system that allows them to streamline their internal and external communication.
Because all the information is entered only once, the consistency of the information used by each functional component is guaranteed. The central database also contains the links between the information for which every individual functional component is responsible. This gives you a 100% up-to-date and accurate overview of your business.
Summary
Extended ERP: greater than the sum of its parts
As we discussed, extended ERP emerged from three basic principles: I keeping everything in one database guarantees that all relevant information will be quickly available to employees at all times, thereby reducing the amount of paper and the time needed to make key decisions I providing secure, role based access by all in a single sign-on environment ensures employees, customers, partners and others have the information they need I automating all business processes leads to streamlined workflow requiring less time to complete tasks The result is an integrated package so multi-faceted that it is difficult to categorize. Is it a workflow package? A tool for sales force automation? A tool to manage your help desk? For automation of professional services delivered by, for example, consultants? An HRM package? An item management package? A tool for document management? For financial consolidation? A Web publishing tool? A corporate portal? An e-business package? As unbelievable as it sounds, the response to each of these questions should be "Yes". By integrating these functional components into one application, organizations of all sizes in all industries can increase collaboration, create organizational transparency and efficiency, and extend the power of business systems like never before. The key to implementing this system is to map out the company's business processes beforehand.
2006 Exact Software North America, Inc. All rights reserved. Other Registered Trademarks Are Property of Their Respective Owners. MAS1393, 2/06
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